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What 'SimCity' And Always-Online DRM Mean For Video Game Reviews

If you’re going to make an always-online game that doesn’t necessarily need to be always-online (traditional MMORPGs, for instance, only function online; Diablo 3 and SimCity could easily be made to function offline) you’d better get your ducks in a row first.

SimCity’s launch has been badly bruised by servers not up to the task, with myriad angry gamers unable to play the product they just…I want to say purchased, but you never really own something that relies on someone else’s servers. So let’s call it “licensed.”

Anyways, this isn’t all that interesting in and of itself. It would have been much more surprising had everything gone according to plan.

So here’s the thing: reviewers who were able to play the game free of its always-online DRM side-effects were able to enjoy it a great deal; on the other hand, countless consumers faced a host of entirely avoidable problems that made their gaming experience much different. There’s no corruption here, no “paid reviews” stuff going on. But there is a fundamental difference in how early review playtime and post-launch playtime altered the experience for reviewers and gamers.

So here’s what I propose: no more reviews for always-online games until at least two days after launch. A lot of MMOs aren’t reviewed for a week or two, and even then are usually reviewed over time rather than all at once.

Games like Diablo III and SimCity aren’t MMOs, but they can’t be reviewed the same way we review offline titles. It may not take weeks or months like a full-fledged MMO review might take, but to review Diablo III fairly you need to review its accessibility and the impact the online only nature of the game has on gameplay even down to the ability of gamers to log into their accounts.

Same goes for SimCity. The decision to make these games always-online is a big one that impacts the way games are played and enjoyed in a serious way, sometimes for the better but also sometimes for the worse.

I admire Polygon’s re-scoring, but I can’t help but feel like it’s still too-little too-late. If you give the game a 9.5, how many people will buy it off of that score before you change it to an 8? And really, how do we come up with the point value of launch accessibility in the first place?

I’d apply the same rule to Metacritic scores as well, including user scores. Right now SimCity has been bombed pretty badly by users. Just as the critic scores might be a bit harsher, user scores might be a bit softer if the game didn’t open to reviews for two or three days, or even a week, after launch.

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We never own the games we buy, they’re always licensed to us to use once, and either transfer that license to someone else on a resale or it cannot be resold because of things like Steam or Xbox Live or the like.

But this is simply another case of journalists reviewing something before it is truly able to be experienced. Just like last year with Mass Effect 3, people only reviewed up to a small part of the game before they put a review out, not allowing them to get a full scope of the game and how it is like everything else out there when they don’t finish it.

Maybe it’s the publishers fault for holding games so close to the release for fear of leaks, or maybe it’s the lazy journalists fault for expecting the whole game to be completely reviewable after a few hours. I know for damn well you would not be able to wholly review classic games like Chrono Trigger or Earthbound or Final Fantasy VI, all of which have twists late in the game to really change the story and mood, like they do with recent RPGs and other games.

I do, the game is a fun game i will admit that. however, the servers are constantly down, they arent up and when they are up they go down shortly after. so please dont act like its some conspiracy theory going on with the reviewers, this has to do with ea refusal to listen to its fan base.

you see, this isnt the first time this has happened with drm released material. spores is a good example of how eas drm system fails. well here we are yet again, ea has failed with their drm system once more. they wanted an online game similar to that of blizzards diablo 3 and look what they got? a broken city simulation game that cant run for more then an hour at best.

blizzards diablo 3 worked because the company it self strives to prefect their games to a point that your able to play them.

in conclusion, the party at fault here is not the reviewers but rather ea for not polishing their game a bit better. in my eyes, everyone that wants a refund, should get one for a fail product. you dont go to a car dealership and buy a car blindly. no you first go for a test drive to see how it runs, how it feels and etc. if you ddi buy a car blindly then you think the dealership wouldnt try to accommodate you some way to keep you as their customer? im sure many places would, I even think they may at one point offer a refund or a new car. I guess my point is to all my ranting is that people deserve their money back for a faulty product.

Publishers send their games to major reviewers/critics 2 or 3 weeks in advance. The reviewer agree’s to publish the review after a certain date. Sometimes it’s a week before release sometimes it’s on the day of release. This is to ensure reviewers get enough time to complete the thing.

People say that reviewers didn’t get a chance to play till the end of ME3′s ending… but all the ones I read did…

” They just hedged their bets by saying stuff like ‘some will be disappointed’…or it’s ‘controversial’. Reviewing can be a collaborative process, people that review a game often do it on an island and have no1 to bounce idea’s off. The result…you give giant plot holes and questions in a story the benefit of the doubt. ” I’m regurgitating this vid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT_x64921ls&t=8m16s

Uhm, I very much own the games I buy just like any other product and can do a lot of things with them, including reselling, setting on fire, modifying (as long as it doesn’t require circumventing copy protections), lending them to friends or taking a dump in the box.

EULA agreements don’t primarily concern me, only as much as I have to abide by them since they are citing common law like copyright that forbids me to duplicate and sell copies of games or do any number of other things. This would be forbidden, no matter if an EULA says it or not. Online platforms are a more complicated matter and try to argue that they are offering a “service” and “subscriptions” and not a product, but the last word in the court of law hasn’t exactly been spoken in that matter yet.

I don’t know how you do things in the good ol’ USofA, but over here we still have things like consumer rights for things we buy, no matter how hard some companies are trying to argue we don’t.

“Diablo 3 and SimCity could easily be made to function offline.” Where did u get this information from? D3 can not be simple be made to function offline. Blizz would have to build a different game that does not handle most of the complex calculations going on on their servers. Same with SimCity. Do some research. This old and boring argument against DRM smells of uninformed game fanboy.

At least the features that depend on the online servers (such as trading on the global market) could be disabled when the servers were offline, meanwhile the rest of the game that doesn’t depend could be accessible. This would be a win win for everybody! Such features make sense to have an online service for, EA could do their DRM, if servers went down or EA permanently shuts off the servers, players could still play.

Don’t know about SimCity. But D3 was conceived with the auction house as an integral part. Auction house requires an internet connection. And it simply doesn’t make any sense to develop a mayor feature for a 100 mil+ AAA game and give your fickle users to option not to use it.

My point was about the always online requirement. The auction house and the online requirement was build into the game during development, way before the shitstorm that followed after launch. They had no idea people would not like it. And fundamentally it is not a bad idea, I think the implementation lacked refinement, something that they seem to be working on.

Perhaps the information came from the possibility that the console port of Diablo 3 will be launched with none of the always online DRM, something that is supposedly integral to the games design.

If this turns out to be accurate, then it is likely not as hard as they claim, and they had other reasons (profit from AH) to force and maintain it.

SimCity on the other hand claims it is due to the calculations, something that has been called into question because of Glassbox’s lack of multi-threading support. Again if this info is correct, GB was designed for single core CPUs, forcing the need for servers to run the calculations. The supposed reason for this being dads PC. I don’t know about anybody else, but my dads PC hasn’t had a single core CPU since 2007.

Being an eternal cynic, I once again do not believe this for a second, this would be consumer friendly practices from a company famed for having none.

I’m not sure if you’re aware, but Diablo and SimCity were offline games before they were online games. At least twice. From a gameplay perspective, I didn’t notice a whole lot more going on in D3 than I did in D2 aside from the auction house. I fail to see how that should require an internet connection to play the game. I also fail to see why they couldn’t have reserved the “complex calculations going on on their servers” to happen on your HD when playing offline, or theirs if you wanted online play (similar to how in D2 your bnet characters were on their servers, not your computer.)

I’m sorry if the argument is old and boring, but there is yet to be any sort of rational, logical explanation given in response.

thats not true at all. if that was the case the pirates wouldnt have figured out how to make it work offline. so the option of it working online is possible. the reason why they dont make it offline is because they want to monitor what goes on with their products and who owns those products. drm was created to fight piracy but has failed many times over. numbers from the game spore is a clear indication to why drm fail. the game got pirated and broken into. who do you think that hurt? pirates or customers? clearly the victim always is the customers. its at our expense that they try and fight these groups. well now they dont have to with the new six strike rule that went into effect. so whats the excuse now?